Studying Galactic interstellar turbulence through fluctuations in synchrotron emission: First LOFAR Galactic foreground detection

TL;DR

This study uses LOFAR observations to analyze Galactic synchrotron emission fluctuations, providing new constraints on the turbulence outer scale and magnetic field ratios, which are crucial for understanding interstellar magnetic turbulence.

Contribution

First to derive the outer scale of interstellar turbulence and magnetic field ratios from LOFAR synchrotron fluctuation power spectra.

Findings

Outer scale of turbulence is about 10-20 pc.

Power spectrum follows a -1.84 slope between 100 and 8 arcmin.

Ratios of ordered to random magnetic fields are 0.3 to 0.5.

Abstract

The characteristic outer scale of turbulence and the ratio of the random to ordered components of the magnetic field are key parameters to characterise magnetic turbulence in the interstellar gas, which affects the propagation of cosmic rays within the Galaxy. We provide new constraints to those two parameters. We use the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) to image the diffuse continuum emission in the Fan region at (l,b) (137.0,+7.0) at 80"x70" resolution in the range [146,174] MHz. We detect multi-scale fluctuations in the Galactic synchrotron emission and compute their power spectrum. Applying theoretical estimates and derivations from the literature for the first time, we derive the outer scale of turbulence and the ratio of random to ordered magnetic field from the characteristics of these fluctuations . We obtain the deepest image of the Fan region to date and find diffuse continuum emission within the primary beam. The power spectrum of the foreground synchrotron fluctuations displays a power law behaviour for scales between 100 and 8 arcmin with a slope of (-1.84+/-0.19). We find an upper limit of about 20 pc for the outer scale of the magnetic interstellar turbulence toward the Fan region. We also find a variation of the ratio of random to ordered field as a function of Galactic coordinates, supporting different turbulent regimes. We use power spectra fluctuations from LOFAR as well as earlier GMRT and WSRT observations to constrain the outer scale of turbulence of the Galactic synchrotron foreground, finding a range of plausible values of 10-20 pc. Then, we use this information to deduce lower limits of the ratio of ordered to random magnetic field strength. These are found to be 0.3, 0.3, and 0.5 for the LOFAR, WSRT and GMRT fields considered respectively. Both these constraints are in agreement with previous estimates.